[2] Its initial business focus was making solid-state electronics and related instruments for automatic control systems.
[8] The Vidar division was acquired from Continental Telephone by TRW, Inc., a large conglomerate in a number of businesses, in May 1975 for $14 million.
[13] Computationally, the control processing for the TRW Vidar ITS switches was done by two Intel 8080 microprocessors, in a high use/low use, fault-tolerant configuration.
[12] According to recollections published in the Embedded Muse newsletter, the control code was written in the C programming language and cross-compiled to the 8080 from a PDP-11 minicomputer running Version 6 Unix.
[16] In any case, TRW Vidar was certainly one of the first companies to produce a working digital switch for use in central offices.
[17] By 1982 there were stresses within the telephony industry due to the breakup of the Bell System and the early 1980s recession in the United States.
[18] The Vidar business was characterized by large development and start-up costs and a low near-term size of the independent companies market.
[21] The CEO of TRW Vidar offered to buy out the company almost as soon as it withdrew from the digital switch market.
[22] But by 2001 they were not, and what property American Digital Switching had remaining was put up at a Brevard County, Florida auction.